That night, Fiona gently brushed Leelo’s long hair while Ketty pulled Sage’s auburn strands into something resembling a plait. Tate was already asleep, and the living room was silent save for Sage’s muttered protests and the crackling of the fire.

All day, Leelo had been trying to make sense of what they had witnessed. She’d always believed there would be no contact with Tate once he was gone and that anyone who knew what the Forest was capable of would run as far from it as possible so they would never be tempted to return.

As a child, Leelo had doted on her little brother, before she understood that he would be leaving by his twelfth birthday—only weeks away now—if his magic didn’t come. It was generally assumed that if it hadn’t appeared by then, an Endlan was well and truly incantu, and while they may not immediately fall prey to Endla’s music, they would eventually. It was a far better fate to leave early than to stay until it was too late.

Around his tenth birthday, Tate gave up on singing his prayers to the Forest and began speaking them instead, knowing there was no magic in his voice. Leelo did her best to distance herself from him then, but it quickly became clear that the separation would be as painful as severing a limb, whether they did it now or when it came time for him to leave. He still tried to crawl into her side of the bed on cold nights, and sometimes she didn’t have the heart to kick him out. Sleeping next to him, his face still bearing the slightest traces of baby fat, she couldn’t imagine him alone in the world.

“Why do we send them away?” Leelo whispered, even though she knew the answer.

“Those without magic aren’t strong enough to resist it,” Fiona said, her voice so soft it made Leelo’s eyelids heavy. “That’s why we can’t allow them to stay on Endla.”

Leelo sighed. “But surely we could protect them somehow.”

“You know that’s impossible. They would run straight into our traps the moment we sang the hunting song,” Ketty answered, her voice as sharp as her gaze in the firelight.

Sage scrambled away from her mother’s rough hands and picked up a set of small antlers, still covered in soft velvet. The young buck she’d taken them from had died of natural causes; hunting wouldn’t resume on the island until after the festival. Sage had strung holly berries on a thread earlier and now proceeded to wind them around the antlers, fashioning her crown for the spring festival.

“So what if a few incantu are caught,” she said. “At least the Forest would be sated.”

Leelo frowned at her cousin. “How can you say that? Just because someone doesn’t have magic doesn’t mean they deserve to die.”